In Case You Missed It: This Week in Review

This week, we highlight a number of ongoing campaigns to make the food system more sustainable: the Food Day Campaign is educating consumers about the health consequences of soda consumption, California citizens are gearing up to vote on GM food labeling requirements under proposition 37, and Oxfam America’s GROW campaign urges consumers to take small steps toward food justice and equity.

Photo credit: Bernard Pollack

Want to get involved? Ask the Trader Joe’s grocery chain to support labeling of GM foods this election, and sign up to host a World Food Day dinner on October 16th to spread awareness of global food and agricultural issues!

Next week, Nourishing the Planet director Danielle Nierenberg will be participating in the DialogueNext workshop at the World Food Prize’s 2012 Borlaug Dialogue. This youth-engaging session will include a variety of rapid-fire talks, case studies, and conversations that focus on engaging young people in the future of agricultural development. Stay tuned for a full report of the workshop.

We also examine the latest global research portfolio of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the world’s largest publicly funded global agricultural research partnership. At the Fourth Agriculture and Rural Development Day gathering, CGIAR unveiled a new global research portfolio worth US$5 billion over five years. Read more about the research program here.

Further highlights from the past week:

Our indigenous livestock of the week is the yak. Originating in the “roof of the world,” the yak is an important animal, providing a host of nutritional and practical benefits to the people of the Tibetan plateau. It can withstand freezing temperatures and sparse vegetation, and is a major source of meat, milk, fiber, and hide. Read more about the hardy but endangered animal here.

This week’s Saturday Series interview is with Gigi Pomerantz, the executive director of Youthaiti. Youthaiti is a nonprofit promoting ecological sanitation in Haiti. “As a nurse practitioner, my focus has always been on prevention,” said Pomerantz. “Sanitation is prevention at its most basic level.” To read the full interview, click here.

We continued to receive some exciting news coverage this week. Danielle Nierenberg was interviewed in an article for The Epoch Times about Bhutan’s plans to transition its national food production to 100 percent organic by 2020. Read the full article here.

Now it’s your turn: What were your favorite posts from the week? What do you hope we’ll write about next week? Let us know in the comments!

To purchase State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet please click HERE.